If you're just heard the phrase 'Tag and Ping' and scratching your head in puzzlement - this article may be worth your time. Not that Tag and Ping is some magic marketing formula that will deliver untold riches. It won't.

It is just one more marketing tool professional online marketers are using to give their site or sites a competitive edge over their competition. It will help put your site on the Internet map and if done right, Tag and Ping will deliver plenty of very targeted traffic to your sales pages. It will boost your rankings and increase your sales.

Tag and Ping is one of those simple, yet relatively unknown marketing techniques savvy Internet Marketers have been using and trying to keep quiet for years. To truly understand how Tag and Ping works, you will have to know some basic background information on keywords, blogging, tags, and how all these can work in sync to deliver traffic, links and sales to your site.

* What are Blogs?

Most web users will know a blog is an online journal where bloggers post their daily or hourly entries (their opinions, views, info, links) on any subject that interests them. The most popular blogging systems are Blogger.com (owned by Google) Bloglines (owned by Ask Jeeves), LiveJournal, and many professional marketers use the free WordPress software which they can host on their own websites.

Each blog has its own RSS feed - RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication although its original acronym stood for Rich Site Summary. These RSS feeds broadcasts the information in the blog posts to all concerned parties - those who have subscribed and use an RSS reader or aggregator. Or more commonly, subscribers use the FireFox browser, Google Desktop, or MyYahoo to access their favorite RSS feeds. The next version of Windows will have RSS embedded into its operating system.

* What are Tags?

Tags are really another name for keywords. Most surfers will know keywords are the exact words Internet users type into search engines to find what they're looking on the world wide web. Tags work in the same way and are a form of social bookmarking, a way of classifying and accessing all that content in all those countless blogs.

Many major blogging directories such as Technorati use tags to serve up the information to its patrons. One simple technique to create a tag in Technocrati:

Laptops (remove asterisks in actual code)

Or if your blogging software supports categories; this will be recognized by Technorati as a tag.

* What the heck is a Ping?

A ping is a simple way to notify the different search engines to let them know that your blog has been updated. You call up or ping your blog post.

You bookmark or place an entry in any one of the countless blogging sites such as Technorati, Furl, del.icio.us, Blinklist, Flickr --- you go to these sites and click your blog or tag to inform them you have updated your blog. Many blogging systems will automatically ping your blog updates.